Integrated scheduling of perishable food production and distribution with unmanned aerial vehicles

With the development of the times and the change of people's lifestyles, people are opting to order food online. For the perishable food, the delivery time and quality requirements are getting stricter. However, in practice, the production of perishable food mostly relies on experience decision-making, and the distribution mainly relies on takeaway riders, which affects the efficiency of the system. This paper aims to optimize the integrated scheduling of perishable food production and distribution with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A mixed-integer linear program (MILP) is proposed to formulate the problem. We resort to CPLEX solver with branch-and-cut algorithm to solve the problem. Experiments on randomly generated instances up to 50 customers demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed model.